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Politics : Foreign Policy Discussion Thread -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (6387)	12/30/2003 1:04:51 AM
From: MSI	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 15987

War is not condusive to accurate record keeping about mass human death, unless you're engaged in assembly line style process of it as the Nazis were with the Jews. This is a departure from US policy. In 'nam there were counts that were often tampered with and politicized, but the attempt was made. In WWII there were immediate estimates of the dead, even in conflagrations in Dresden and Tokyo. These estimates were extremely important in knowing the damage to the enemy. This is a departure, that does not bode well for future rules of engagement, where WMDs and highly automated and highly lethal campaigns can easily be launched on flimsy evidence or for purely domestic political reasons. The pressure to downplay the dead will be overwhelming, even in a catastrophic attack. Another major loss of accountability, and the road to disaster for US moral authority, and authority in general. The temptation to DOD to multiply the lethality of an attack, if it was thought such could be kept secret, would be irresistable. Imagine what Curtis LeMay would have done under a president Bush had he thought it could have been downplayed? He would have nuked USSR, as he tried to convince Ike and JFK. This is the direction we're headed.